Introducing the brain: a new consciousness declaration (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, April 22, 2024, 16:50 (213 days ago) @ David Turell

A degree of phenomenal awareness in many forms with differing nervous systems:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/insects-and-other-animals-have-consciousness-experts-dec...

"The new declaration reads, in part: “The empirical evidence indicates at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates (including all reptiles, amphibians and fishes) and many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans and insects).” Inspired by recent research findings that describe complex cognitive behaviors in these and other animals, the document represents a new consensus and suggests that researchers may have overestimated the degree of neural complexity required for consciousness.

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"The declaration focuses on the most basic kind of consciousness, known as phenomenal consciousness. Roughly put, if a creature has phenomenal consciousness, then it is “like something” to be that creature — an idea enunciated by the philosopher Thomas Nagel in his influential 1974 essay, “What is it like to be a bat?” Even if a creature is very different from us, Nagel wrote, “fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism. … We may call this the subjective character of experience.” If a creature is phenomenally conscious, it has the capacity to experience feelings such as pain or pleasure or hunger, but not necessarily more complex mental states such as self-awareness. (my bold)

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"The new declaration updates the most recent effort to establish scientific consensus on animal consciousness. In 2012, researchers published the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, which said that an array of nonhuman animals, including but not limited to mammals and birds, have “the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors” and that “humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.”

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"While many of the animals mentioned in the declaration have brains and nervous systems that are very different from those of humans, the researchers say that this needn’t be a barrier to consciousness. For example, a bee’s brain contains only about a million neurons, compared to some 86 billion in the case of humans. But each of those bee neurons may be as structurally complex as an oak tree. The network of connections they form is also incredibly dense, with each neuron contacting perhaps 10,000 or 100,000 others. The nervous system of an octopus, by contrast, is complex in other ways. Its organization is highly distributed rather than centralized; a severed arm can exhibit many of the behaviors of the intact animal.

"The upshot, Andrews said, is that “we might not need nearly as much equipment as we thought we did” to achieve consciousness. She noted, for example, that even a cerebral cortex — the outer layer of the mammalian brain, which is believed to play a role in attention, perception, memory and other key aspects of consciousness — may not be necessary for the simpler phenomenal consciousness targeted in the declaration.

“'There was a big debate about whether fish are conscious, and a lot of that had to do with them lacking the brain structures that we see in mammals,” she said. “But when you look at birds and reptiles and amphibians, they have very different brain structures and different evolutionary pressures — and yet some of those brain structures, we’re finding, are doing the same kind of work that a cerebral cortex does in humans.'”

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The declaration itself:

"The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness
Which animals have the capacity for conscious experience? While much uncertainty remains, some points of wide agreement have emerged.

"First, there is strong scientific support for attributions of conscious experience to other mammals and to birds.

"Second, the empirical evidence indicates at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates (including reptiles, amphibians, and fishes) and many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects).

"Third, when there is a realistic possibility of conscious experience in an animal, it is irresponsible to ignore that possibility in decisions affecting that animal. We should consider welfare risks and use the evidence to inform our responses to these risks."

Comment: there is no question animas are aware, perform purposeful activities and also can play. What they lack, as my bold notes, is self-awareness.

a degree in many anuimals